Big business

St rictly, Apple is not the first company ever to hit a value of one trillion dollars. China’s state–run oil giant PetroChina reached $1.7 trillion in 2007 when it debuted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. However, this was just before the global financial crisis; oil prices collapsed, and by the end of 2008 PetroChina slumped to under $260bn — the greatest loss of shareholder wealth in world history, Bloomberg reports.

Allowing for inflation, Time magazine suggests other historical contenders, including Standard Oil, which was likely worth the equivalent of a trillion dollars in today’s money before it was broken up by antitrust regulators in the early 1900s.

Even today, Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state–owned oil corporation, is valued at around $1.5 trillion, with an initial public offering of shares due early 2019.

Still, Apple has set a record for the US stock market. By contrast, at the end of June, after poor financial results, Facebook shares fell 19%, wiping almost $120bn off its market cap — the largest fall in value ever suffered by a US listed company in a single day.